[plug] UDMA disks and Red Hat 5.1

[Paul Wilson]

I've been gradually upgrading a couple of elderly Linux machines over the
last few month (both used to be Slackware), bringing Linux a bit more up to
date and, for the faster machine, adding a new larger hard drive. I've
noticed that the machine with the new 5.1 Gb UDMA drive is considerably
slower that the 486DX100 with a couple of SCSI drives.

The Linux docs suggests that UDMA drivers are still in BETA, but the
motherboard in question is 18 months old and doesn't support UDMA anyway,
so I'm not sure that's anything to do with it. As an example of performance
difference, I've got a shell script which generates an HTML page describing
the machine environment, the longest part of which is a list of the RPMs
available. The 486 takes a couple of minutes tops, the other (it's a Cyrix
166 MMX) takes 23/24.

Anyone have any ideas ?

Thanks,

Paul